Small companies may not be able to afford the lavish holiday parties that their larger counterparts often throw for employees, but that simply means they need to be more creative about their festivities. I asked few small business owners how they plan to celebrate with their employees this month, and was pretty impressed with their responses. If you’re still wracking your brain for ideas, think about stealing one of these:
Vegas, baby. Okay, this isn’t exactly cheap. But Mitch Goldstone, the CEO of ScanMyPhotos.com in Irvine, CA, thinks his employees are worth every penny he spent on a four-day trip for everyone to Las Vegas. The staff stayed at Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino’s penthouse Executive Suite, were treated to four-days of gourmet dining experiences, a limousine tour of the famed Vegas Strip, an evening chartered helicopter tour above The City of Lights and private suites for all employees. Goldstone invests 25% of his annual marketing and advertising budget not on customers, but on his staff. “My company’s success is due to our employees, and in return the holidays are just one annual opportunity to dazzle them,” he says
About the author: Donna Fenn is the author of Upstarts: How Gen Y Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success and Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business Can Become A Leader of the Pack. She has more than twenty years of experience writing about entrepreneurship and small business trends as a contributing editor at Inc. magazine, an expert on Business.com, and a featured expert on SBTV.com. From 1988 to 1992, she lived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where she was a correspondent for The Associated Press and covered business, culture, the economy, and the Gulf War.
